Cloud atlas

The word “cloud” conjures up numerous things to numerous people which can cause confusion but
also illustrates just how wide the term stretches and how many different potential technology
solutions there could be for resellers to pitch at customers.

Each market has its take on cloud, meaning plenty of chances to help customers, even if a
reseller is not selling infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or the hosted software applications.

Explaining just what cloud means to customers and their
business is a challenge that any reseller must acknowledge is going to crop up.

“Cloud computing can help customers with many challenges, but the channel needs to be acutely
aware of the confusion and scepticism around the cloud,” says Campbell Williams, group strategy and
marketing director at Six Degrees Group. “A recent survey commissioned by Six Degrees Group found
that there is a growing sense of discontent among business decision-makers in relation to how
technology service companies are promoting and selling cloud services. It also highlighted that
senior management feel baffled by the amount of new phrases and jargon that they are expected to
keep up with.

“The channel can help customers overcome this by speaking to them about solutions for business
problems rather than about the technology itself. For instance, their requirements for business
continuity and disaster recovery policies; the wish for users to choose which devices they adopt in
the workplace; the demand for flexible working practices and the desire to ensure the business is
optimised for the future,” he says.

“Both have their pros and cons and come with different levels of commitment, financially and
technically. To broker is to become a pure reseller; to choose the cloud services you want to sell
and educate your sales team on how to sell them most effectively. Taking the build approach
requires a business shift to becoming a service provider and you need to be certain that you have
the operational skills needed to run a platform efficiently.”

I would suggest there is a process that needs to be followed:

Broker

• Work out how you are going to generate opportunity for Cloud Services.
• Will the cloud services be under a white label service or will you expose the service provider to
your customers?
• Ensure compensation plans for cloud resell enable the current sales team to benefit.
• Ensure education of the current sales team.
• It needs to be agreed on whether you would prefer an upfront payment from the service provider
for the service resell or payments through the service billing lifecycle.

Builder

• Consideration of operational skills to run the platform(s) as efficiently as possible.
• Portal investment – a big differentiator in the market is the overlay portal for both automation
and orchestration but also client access to their service.
• “Peripheral” services such as back up & DR as a service can be a good start point for
reseller movement to service provision.
• Hybrid services are a great way of selling into existing customers.

Williams also is keen to stress that despite the hype, there are real opportunities to present
cloud solutions to solve real business challenges.

One of the question marks that continually hovers over cloud deployments is related to security
and resellers can look to ease customers’ fears with various products.

“Often, with the cloud, security is the ‘elephant in the room’,” says Ian Kilpatrick, chairman
of Wick Hill. “Customers may not be confident enough to express their concerns and sales people may
not be willing to raise the subject, in case they scare the horses and delay the sale. “Or they may
not wish to raise the subject in case of complexity.”

He adds that raising security in a pitch splits those who can and cannot offer that service and
it will demonstrate which resellers can help create a trusted hosted environment.

“And perhaps most importantly, it puts responsibility for security into the customers’ hands. If
the customer buys on price and declines the security option, they have made that choice. If
anything happens in the future, it was their decision,” he says.

“The customer can migrate to different security levels, as budget and risk profile changes. Or
they may take the security options, adding extra margin and recurring revenues to the deal,” he
adds.

“With consumer experience of mobility, high performance wireless, and cloud at home driving
demand, cloud services will continue to grow.”

The advice from Kilpatrick is to concentrate on some straightforward solutions to start with,
offering two factor authentication, anti-virus and mobile device management (MDM).

“For those VARs with a greater appetite for security solutions, firewall security, virtual
security, content management and SIEM are all areas where cloud-based services can deliver benefits
and create considerable customer stickiness,” he adds.

Stay ahead of security curve

Check Point’s UK managing director Terry Greer-King is also flying the security banner reminding
customers that standing still is not an option and actually cloud services can help.

“Security threats are getting more sophisticated and ever more frequent, so it’s a problem for
even the best-equipped security teams at end users to stay ahead of the curve. Cloud security
offerings help to take a lot of the burden away, especially when they’re delivered by established
security vendors,” he says.

But along with security one of the other main issues for customers has been around reliability
and the question of whether or not the existing systems can actually take the strain of moving some
applications into a more flexible, hosted environment.

Philip Smith, UK & Ireland channel director for Ipanema Technologies, points out that
customers must be informed of what moving to the cloud will mean in terms of infrastructure.

“A reseller needs to be able to advise them and tell them what the services are and prepare
them,” he adds “You also have to be able to advise customers on how to move to the cloud. You’ll
need to explain what bandwidth and infrastructure is required.”

“It’s better to advise the customer, or the end user, of the appropriate sizing of networks. To
support cloud, it’s not just about what the reseller is selling to the customer. It’s also
about
what the customer is taking from other suppliers,” says Smith.

Karl Barton, vice-president of EMEA at Exinda, also has a warning for those hoping they can just
wing it with a move to the cloud.

“The growth in cloud computing, consumer-driven IT trends such as BYOD and rich communication
such as VoIP and video is having a massive impact on networks and will continue to do so for the
next few years. In the future, blindly accelerating traffic across the network will not be enough,”
he says.

Stand out from the crowd

Exinda's Barton is not alone in talking about the impact on infrastructure, and Steve Johnson,
channel director for Northern Europe at Extreme Networks, believes that getting it right can help
resellers stand out from the crowd.

The reseller options

Forget box-shifting, small and medium-sized enterprises will not be buying traditional
datacentre gear in five years. Kevin Brown, CEO at Coraid looks at the channel’s choices.

• Hire some hackers and build private clouds for customers that are data-centric.
• There are huge services opportunities with the winner-takes-all stack resell opportunity for
those who control the architecture.
• Take advantage of the new class of commercial technologies emerging to enable Amazon-like
automation and economics for private clouds – the software-defined datacentre (SDDC)
• This has already played out in the compute layer (with virtualisation) and is starting in
software-defined networking (SDN). Storage is next (SDS) and it will upset a $30bn industry
structure.
• The value for the channel is in aligning the stack layers to deliver private clouds for specific
industries and segments. This requires programmable building blocks and flexibility to combine open
source and proprietary technology in a pragmatic way. Independent software vendors can build
“applications” on the software-defined platform.
• There will also be opportunities in REST-based hosted application deployment (e.g Hadoop as a
service, GoEngineer CAD software as a service, Zimbra email service, etc.)

“IT infrastructure has become a significant source of differentiation for companies in every
industry,” he says. “Without doubt, a company’s mission critical applications are important in
driving the business agility needed to enhance competitive advantage, profitability, and
shareholder value. Thus, organisations looking to invest in cloud solutions will be scrupulous
about protecting the integrity and security of their investment. They will look to invest in cloud
products and solutions that can demonstrably meet and exceed they own expectations. It should be an
obvious statement, but resellers will see the best returns in areas in which they are able to
differentiate themselves and add real value to their customers.”

Along with security and infrastructure, a third area that can really reap some rewards for
resellers is to focus on the management side of the cloud equation. Customers are looking for
products that will help them work out how their applications are performing, the changing demands
on the network as well as some mobile device management tools to help with those staff that want to
bring their own devices to work.

“With Cloud solutions looking to increase and evolve in 2013, resellers wanting to sell cloud
products and services need to differentiate from the pack. They need to stand out in what is
becoming a noisy market and jump out with complimentary IT management tools which are a great
starting point,” says Jane Brett, Allied Telesis sales director, UKISA.

“IT management tools satisfy the reseller and the customer needs, and are aimed at simplifying
the customer’s experience. From conversations with partners, we are seeing that there is an
increasing demand for managed services, such as data security. This could also be a selling point
to a customer wanting further protection to sensitive data. Including this in a cloud offering
provides more flexibility and control over their IT and stand out,” she adds.

The other key to management is in the delivery and the reseller must compete with an internal IT
department approach that is used to SLAs and clear dashboards and reports on what is going on.

Resources need to be delivered as a service, not individual virtual machines or a storage
solution, they also need to be deployed when required and more importantly removed when they are
not. The most effective approach to implementing a cloud solution is consider both the deployment
and lifecycle of a service and provide that to the business users as a self-service function,” says
Peter Mansell, sales manager, HP CloudSystem.

The other main area that has the potential to offer resellers a great deal to talk about in
front of customers is software as a service (SaaS), which continues to be in demand because of the
relatively tightly defined solution sale approach that comes from offering specific
applications.

“If it’s the first time that a vendor will be selling cloud products and services, they should
look to covering an area that is in demand from customers. For example, SaaS is a topic that is
specific and one where resellers can add value. They can take on a vanilla product and customise it
according to their client’s demands,” says John Green, CTO at Prolinx.

The other benefit of pitching SaaS is that a lot of the work around educating the user about the
concept and particular product options has already been done for the reseller by some of the main
vendors trying to get a slice of the market. Think of the efforts Microsoft has put in educating
Office users about the cloud capabilities of the latest Office 365 version and it helps make life
easier for the resellers.

He believes that even with an application that is a household name, there are still options for
resellers to optimise the SaaS offering ensuring that the infrastructure can cope with the demands
of hosted applications.

“Optimising SaaS applications is a great ‘in’ for resellers, targeting customers who have
already bought into the cloud,” he adds “Then, once your foot is in the door, there’s a wealth of
potential cloud-focused opportunities in a customer’s IT estate, from cloud managed networking to
data storage, cloud backup and load balancing.”

The final point to be made is one that nearly all main vendors agree on – that the future for
now is a hybrid world. Customers are going to move towards the cloud at different speeds and with
different attitudes towards certain applications and data sets. No reseller should knock on a
customer’s door expecting a 100% shift to the cloud to be on the cards. Neither is a solution
offering from a single provider going to be the norm and the channel will have to rely on its usual
expertise of offering a range of options to increasingly cloud savvy customers.

“Hybrid cloud is a natural evolution in the market and represents a good way for companies to
get the best out of cloud. Hybrid cloud utilises the less expensive public cloud while ensuring
highly sensitive information is safeguarded,” says Richard Roberts, lead of Cisco’s UKI Partner
Organisation

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